Skyscape Completed, Plus Kit Review

Skyscape is done, pressed and framed! Hooray!

Skyscape Finsihed

Admittedly, the frame is not a perfect fit, but it’s good enough for now. I found it lying around in a pile of spares, and I really can’t be doing with trying to get a custom sized one at the moment. Here’s a close up of the details in the beading and metallics to distract you from the poor framing ;D  :

Skyscape Detail

I’ve put it up in a hallway with my Bioshock poster, and another print in similar colours, and I’m pretty pleased with how it looks:

Skyscape Hung

Please excuse the horrible wallpaper, my apartment is a rental so I can’t change it no mater how much I want to!

As usual, I’m going to sum up my experience with this kit in case any readers are planning to buy from the same company or designer. The kit is ‘Skyscape’ by Classic Embroidery, and the designer is Barbara Thompson

Here’s a look at the kit contents – Anchor threads, a silver metallic, some opalescent beads, 14 count aida and 3 needles, for cross stitch, backstitch and beading respectively:

Skyscape Contents

PROS – 

  • Really good quality materials, even the metallic thread was a pleasure to stitch with.
  • I adore the designs in the series, art deco is one of my favourite styles and I think they’re really unique and unusual. They look really modern and elegant displayed in a home compared to some of the more traditonal / old fashioned designs available.
  • Super simple to follow chart in a large print, with an easy-to-read key and symbols.
  • It was very fun to stitch and quick to complete, with lots of large areas of the same colour.
  • Very detailed instructions, ideal for cross stitch beginners
  • Great customer service from the team at Classic Embroidery

CONS – 

  • Nowhere near enough silver metallic thread provided, I ran out less than halfway through the project. However, one quick email to Classic Embroidery and there was a brand new skein posted to me free of charge. There was plenty of all the other materials.
  • Black and white only chart – not that colours would have helped me much, but I know some people prefer it!

11 thoughts on “Skyscape Completed, Plus Kit Review”

  1. Maia T. says:

    I’ve been watching this one grow, and it’s gorgeous!

    I tend to go either way on color charts; they’re sometimes very helpful, but if the colors aren’t chosen well, it can make matters worse. The project I’m doing now is a color chart, and the colors are very true to the actual ones. That’s handy right up until I use my yellow highlighter to color in completed sections. When I color the light blue, it turns green — almost the exact green the chart also uses. Oops.

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    • Oh no, betrayed by your highlighter! Catastrophe! I’ll be sure to remember that can happen, so thank you for the warning.

      I can take or leave a colour chart as well, but if there are multiple colours of backstitch it’s absolutely necessary; different widths and dotted lines just won’t cut it!

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      • Maia T. says:

        I ran into that with the chart for the Kuan Yin project I finished recently. It was in color, but they didn’t use enough colors for the backstitching, so I was trying to differentiate among black, black dotted, dark brown and dark brown dotted. Thanks, guys! I ended up winging most of that.

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  3. Christina says:

    Fantastic job! I love the shimmer 🙂 I didn’t know there were different needles for backstitch and beading! I’ll have to look more into this.

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    • Thank you for your kind words! The only difference really is that backstitch needles need to be a bit sharper, to pierce the aida blocks and get a more precise line, and that beading needles have to have an extra small eye, for threading through the teeny tiny seed beads – but it’s totally fine to just use one needle for everything as long as it fits!

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      • Christina says:

        Thank you!! Makes sense. I’m working on a small wintery xstitch and started it on the regular cream colored Aida and thought about beads for snow so it’s more visible. Will have to look into beading needles 🙂

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  4. Beautiful stitching! That was nice of the company to send you another skein of the metallic free of charge. I am a black and white chart girl. All those colors and symbols drive me crazy! And then coloring over the colored squares even crazier.

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